Branch Rickey read Jackie Robinson the words from Jesus that Papini had underscored

Suddenly, the passionate executive pulled out of his desk drawer fifa 15 coins a heavily marked passage from one of his favorite books, Giovanni Papini’s The Life of Christ. Papini (1881–1956) had been a Harvard student of Wil- liam James, the philosopher-psychologist who wrote “The Moral Equiva- lent of War,” one of Rickey’s favorite essays. Papini had been an atheist, but in researching his history of the life of Jesus Christ, he had became an enthusiastic convert to Christianity. Papini’s book had moved Rickey to order copies for all his children one Christmas.

Branch Rickey read Jackie Robinson the words from Jesus that Papini had underscored: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: But whosoever shall smite thee on thy cheek, turn to him the other also.” After listening to Branch Rickey’s amazing mixture of oratory and psy-chodrama, Jack Roosevelt Robinson said simply, “I have two cheeks, Mr. Rickey. Is that it?” Rickey nodded with deep satisfaction.

The executive did not yet know the extent of Jackie Robinson’s com- petitiveness and will to win, which Rickey would later compare to Ty Cobb’s. Yet, after their initial Brooklyn meeting of almost three hours, Rickey’s intuition told him he had found his man. Branch Rickey sensed in Jackie Robinson everything that he wanted in a race pioneer—great talent, fierce competitiveness, good personal and family values, and a commitment to uplift his race. Clyde Sukeforth remembered that when Robinson promised Rickey at the end of the interview that he would provoke no racial incident, “Well, I thought the old man was going to kiss him.”

“Nobody will ever know the hell Robinson went through in those [first] seasons,” Rickey told Newsweek sports columnist John Lardner ten years later. “He has never opened his face about it, about the details. He never will. Proud man. When he made it, it was made.”12 For his part Rob- inson was immediately won over by Rickey’s compelling combination of competitiveness and spirituality. He recalled that at their first meeting, his “piercing eyes looked at me with such meticulous care, I felt almost naked,” but once he got to know him, he felt that “he was like a piece of mobile armor, and he would throw himself and his advice in the way of anything likely to hurt me.”